amader barite mistiri eshchhilo

i live in an orange and white house now, as opposed to the gritty-greyish-creamish-pinkish-can'tidentify and lightgreen-that-was-once-pink house. you see, the workmen came calling.
i didn't know that my dreams were portent of something. now after sharing bed, clothes, bathroom and every waking minute in the house with an extremely large number of members of the extended family, i feel that i should have known.i woke up one day to find three kids - two skinny and one fat - scraping the wall outside my room. as soon as i glared at them they stopped scraping and started putting a scaffold up. i stomped downstairs to find out that these were our latest houseguests.
the progenitor's brother is getting his house constructed. now junior is a conman par excellence and generally is the sort that gets things done. he got bored of the lack of excitement that his constructions were providing and decided to infuse some change in his routine. so the paint guys were given two-hours notice and told to pack for a week (don't forget toothbrushes and a sheet each) and were brought down from some 230 km away. my kakimoni came along as well - a saving grace - she's a cook worth dying for.
junior took them on an exploratory tour around the block and my mother and aunt cooked alurdom and luchi for "the boys". suitably fortified, "the boys" started on a demolition operation. i was held up at work that first day and when i got back home at 11, i saw three beady pairs of eyes in the living-room, peering from under a heap of sheets that looked extremely familiar. the rest of the house looked like it had been hit with a bomb. and then it all began.
every morning started with the scrape of a metallic sheet against plaster and a cloud of dust. as soon as they'd hear me moving around in the room, they'd stop the scraping and freeze till i went downstairs. there, the kitchen would be a veritable warzone with suggestions flying back and forth regarding what can be done for "the boys". breakfast, lunch and dinner had to offer enough variety - since they were not at home and must be missing their mums terribly - and junior and the progenitor would be sent to the market 13 times. the fish consumption in our house alone must have done something terrible to the ecological balance. each night i'd return home to find them happily watching my telly and i'd recieve frantic phone calls in the middle of interviews with strict instructions to get bengali blockbusters with improbable names. i had to rent 5 DVDs in three days and the local CDwallah gave me a look of disdain that i'll remember for a long time when i asked for abhimanyu. it' maybe a hit philim, but it's still infradig.
then they all decided that it wasn't enough fun as it were and so invitations were sent out. our happy family was joined by five more people, with the cheerful promise that the next team was on it's way. result: we got a lurid yellow bathroom with a pink plastic mirror; a confusion regarding what my great-grandfather's real name was; eleven house guests; three visits to extended family members everyone had forgotten existed; and a great big war over the choice of colours which revealed that my father can't climb trees (o' the shame of it) and that junior's choice of friends have always been inappropriate and that my aunt is extremely scared of monkeys and that my mother had been a closet-worshipper of santoshi-maa even though she knows it was a film and there's no actual deity. her reason - you never know.
anyway "the boys" scraped and cleaned and tried to paint the house a horrible yellow before being threatened with violence. after much heated debate and barbed exchanges regarding aesthetics and artistic sensibilities, the colour for the outer walls were chosen. in a rare moment of unanimity it was decided that we're not getting any more work done and all the paint work inside can be done some other time.
much suscpicious prodding and probing got the real story out. my mother and junior had promised the boys that they'd be sent back this weekend. reason being the local club that "the boys" belong to are hosting a play with cast that's being taken from calcutta and our boys have been assigned duty at the ladies' gate on monday. it would be unpardonable to make them miss that. and of course since it's their first visit to calcutta they'd have to be shown around. so, that thankfully ruled out any more of the paint work being done. this afternoon they were driven around the city by sulky and junior. "the boys" went plane-spotting via the rajarhat highway, they went and rode the metro, they went to victoria memorial and eden gardens and strand road and millenium park and made a round of both the howrah bridges and saw nicco park as well. they were fed coffee and chicken pakoras and dinner was chicken biriyani.
"the boys" are leaving early tomorrow morning.